Archive for the ‘Anagrams’ Category

It began five months ago, on ADS-L, the American Dialect Society mailing list, with a note from the compiler of the Yale Book of Quotations about a piece he’d recently published:

Fred R. Shapiro, Confessions of the Antedater. Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America 39.1.23-42 (2018).

An engaging and informative essay about finding earlier and earlier citations for English words and phrases. At the time, ADS-Ler Mark Mandel exclaimed:

At first I saw it as “Confessions of an Anteater”!

and Larry Horn chimed in:

Me too … Indeed, my mailer tells me that when I type “antedater” I really meant “anteater”. Maybe someone should work on a logo

I seconded the suggestion, but then no one did anything until Fred’s piece came up again yesterday, and everybody made the same misreading again — and I came up not with a logo, but with a mascot, an Anteater With a D, the adorable little Silky Anteater didactylus.

For some time now, I’ve avoided posting about the current POTUS, which has meant not posting a great many cartoons that come my way (most cartoonists are savagely critical of him), or posting the cartoons but not even mentioning his appearance in them. Initially, I referred to him only mockingly: Herr Drumpf at first, then Helmet Grabpussy. Now, many of my friends and acquaintances practice the policy of mentioning him as little as possible and, where necessary, not using his name; [REDACTED] and POTUS are two reference strategies along these lines.

Even so, I’m tickled by an observation made by the Canadian comedian Colin Mochrie — hat tip to Chris Ambidge — that Lord Dampnut is an anagram of POTUS’s real name.

A remarkable long piece in the New York Times Magazine Culture issue on October 30th, by film critic and general cultural critic Wesley Morris, “The Last Taboo: Why American pop culture just can’t deal with black male sexuality”, on the elision (or, alternatively, mythologization) of black male sexuality. In a supremely ironic development, the text of Morris’s piece has itself been elided from the public record (no doubt by massive incompetence rather than malevolence): links on the NYT site (and, as far as I can tell, on all sites that refer to “The Last Taboo”) take you not to this article but to another, racially and sexually irrelevant, Morris piece, “Uncommon Ground: Our New Urban Oases”, on elevated railways turned into pedestrian parks, which is identified as being from the NYT Magazine’s Culture issue (puzzlingly dated October 27th), but it’s not in that issue.

I’ll start by showing you scans of the title pages of “The Last Taboo”, just to show you that I’m not making this up, and then go on to quoting at some length from Morris’s text, which I have spent a very long time typing in by hand.

In the August 2016 issue of Funny Times, a reprinting of a Dave Barry column (from the 7/26Miami Herald), “Is this what really goes on inside the Democratic dance and beer hall?” (about the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia), ending:

I will conclude today’s report with the following:

UPDATE ON TIM KAINE: At this point, all we know for certain about him is that the letters in “Tim Kaine” can be rearranged to spell “I eat mink.”

Even better: “Ain’t Mike”.

As for his Repblican counterpart: “Mike Pence” anagrams to “Keep mince”, or better: “Pink emcee”. I love the idea of anti-gay Pence flouncing on stage in pink.